AWARDS & HONORS

In 1994, The Apartment was chosen by the National Film Preservation Board to be preserved in the Library of Congress National Film Registry.

The Apartment won Academy Awards® for Best Picture, Director (Billy Wilder), Screenplay (Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond), Editing (Daniel Mandell), Black-and-White Art Direction/Set Decoration (Alexander Trauner, Edward G. Boyle).

Wilder became the first person to win three Oscars® in the same year.

The Apartment also received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor (Jack Lemmon), Actress (Shirley MacLaine), Supporting Actor (Jack Kruschen), Black-and-White Cinematography (Joseph LaShelle), Sound (Gordon Sawyer).

Other awards for The Apartment include:
- Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture Comedy, Best Actor Comedy, Best Actress Comedy and a nomination for Best Director.
- British Academy Awards for Best Film from Any Source, Foreign Actor, Foreign Actress.
- Directors Guild of America Award to Wilder and Assistant Director Hal W. Polaire.
- Golden Laurel Awards (Motion Picture Exhibitors) for Top Comedy, Female Dramatic Performance, Male Comedy Performance.
- New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Best Film, Director, Screenplay.
- Venice Film Festival Best Actress Award.
- Writers Guild of America Award for Best-Written American Comedy.

The Critics Corner: THE APARTMENT

"Mr. Wilder has done more than write the film. His direction is ingenious and sure, sparkled by brilliant little touches and kept to a tight, sardonic line." - Bosley Crowther, New York Times, 1960

"Wilder handles his players superbly. He holds an amazingly tight rein on actress MacLaine, which gives her performance a solidity she seldom achieves. Yet it is actor Lemmon, surely the most sensitive and tasteful young comedian now at work in Hollywood, who really cuts the mustard [sic] and carries the show." - Time, 1960.

"Not to beat around the bush, The Apartment is a very funny movie that can take a place among the finest comedies Hollywood has turned out." - Newsweek, 1960

"In none of his films has Mr. Wilder come closer to a Lubitsch theme and style than he did in his brilliant The Apartment. In my estimation, it is one of the finest comedy-dramas that has ever come out of Hollywood. Here Mr. Wilder, well established and comfortably settled in with his new scriptwriter, I.A.L. Diamond, achieved that rare thing in cinema culture, a funny movie containing a serious statement. And he helped to advance Jack Lemmon, the picture's star, as one of the truly fine actors of our time." - Bosley Crowther, Reruns: 50 Memorable Films (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978)

"The happy ending was met with surprise by some critics who did not feel that protagonists who transgressed sexually deserved to find happiness. But Wilder has created human beings, not stereotypes, and they are capable of developing some self-recognition and capacity for growth. The question the movie does not successfully answer is why five supposedly well-paid executives are so totally dependent upon using Bud's rather dingy little flat." - Anne Louise Lynch, Magill's Survey of Cinema, Series I, Vol. 1 (Salem Press, 1980)

"The movie has been photographed in widescreen black and white. The b&w dampens down any jollity that might sweep in with the decorations at the Christmas parties, bars and restaurants where the holidays are in full swing. And the widescreen emphasizes space that separates the characters, or surrounds them with emptiness. The design of Baxter's apartment makes his bedroom door, in the background just to the left of center, a focal point; in there reside the secrets of his masters, the reasons for his resentments, the arena for his own lonely slumber, and eventually the stage on which Miss Kubelik will play out the crucial transition in her life." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, July 22, 2001

"Along with Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Billy Wilder's 1960 Oscar-sweeper The Apartment elevates the workplace romance into a sublime erotica of officious addresses (the omnipresent Mister and Miss) and economic conundrum. ... The triangulation keeps its edges with on-your-toes dialogue and a fine-tuned critique of corporate culture. Lemmon navigates the line between simpering and sympathetic with nervous WASP-ish energy, George Bush, Sr. visited by the facial contortions of Jim Carrey. Most indelibly, MacLaine gives us a gamine with the whole gamut of emotions, a cursed capacity to love, and a limit to her own self-pity." - Ed Park, The Village Voice, December 25-31, 2002

Compiled by Rob Nixon